BrainBot

So, all this work I've been doing for the past few months is starting to show some results: BrainBot* is coming together. BrainBot is the Bioloid humanoid I am building for the Brain Engineering Lab. They plan to use it as an AI research tool for vision and object manipulation tasks.

The chest compartment is coming along, and I have the two wireless cameras mounted on their pan and tilt servos. We had a lot of problems getting wifi to work with the wifi module we had chosen, so we have decided to go with using one of the new gumstix boards onboard, which can do USB host. The gumstix provides us with the ability to use a USB interface chip to talk to the Bioloid bus directly, without needing a microcontroller. When they release the wifi module for it, we will be getting one of those as well - for now, we're going to use a USB wifi module. Thanks once again to some help from my brother (and the guys on the gumstix mailing list) I was able to get my USB wifi module working on the gumstix, and I've also got my PC talking to the Bioloid bus using the USB chip.

*The BrainBot project is directed and funded by the Brain Engineering Lab and Neukom Institute